Transition Teams Assemble!

The Trump Administration may not be willing to acknowledge that Joseph Biden will be the next occupant of the White House, but that has not stopped the Biden-Harris Transition from moving forward. This week, they announced transition teams for cabinet-level agencies and key issue areas.

The list of “agency review” teams is available here. Some of the lists are quite interesting.

As we’re mostly law professors here, it’s interesting how many law professors are on the various lists. The Department of Justice team is headed by Duke Law’s Christopher Schroeder, a veteran of both the Clinton and Obama Administration’s at DOJ. Other law profs on the Justice team are Dawn Johnsen (Indiana), Pam Karlan (Stanford), Richard Lazarus (Harvard), Marty Lederman (Georgetown), Marb McQuade (Michigan), and Christina Rodriguez (Yale).

The DOJ team may have the largest representation of legal academics, but other law professors are sprinkled throughout the other teams. For instance, Kevin Washburn (Iowa) is heading up the Interior Department team, where he is joined by Bob Anderson (Harvard) and Amanda Leiter (American). The Treasury Department team includes Lily Batchelder (NYU) and Mehrsa Baradaran (UC Irvine)(who is also on the Federal Reserve team), and the Environmental Protection Agency team includes Cynthia Giles (Harvard), Joe Goffman (Harvard), and Ken Kopocis (American).

It is also interesting that Leandra English, who temporarily headed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau after Richard Cordray stepped down (and until she was removed by President Trump), will head the CFPB’s agency team.

One final tidbit: Jones Day is unlikely to be shut out of the Biden-Harris Administration, as there is one Jones Day partner on the DOJ agency team.